12/21/2022 - THOUGHTS AWAITING A STORM

My typing table faces west and looks out on what I call The Animal Highway: twelve feet of local growth grass between my windows and a row of lilac bushes. Late Spring, when the lilacs are in bloom, mild winds from the west share the air with the flower itself. Every breath takes in lilac. Animals believe the lilacs hide them from view as they come down from the mountain north of us to cross the creek south of us. Deer, hawk, weasel, woodchuck, squirrels, cat, coyote, bear - seen 'em all, even a wolf once, seen 'em all when they don't know I'm seeing, which is better because usually you only see a wild animal running away, so how much of a wild animal do you ever really get the chance to see? To watch a wild beast at rest or at peace with its business is to see that creature for the first time. It doesn't make one gasp the way flight does. It makes one smile with wonder as if settling into a hot spring under a starry sky.   "Oh, Wow!" rather than "Wha', Huh?" In truth, though, I haven't seen an animal there for a while. A stand of sugar maple with some black cherry and ash is taking over west of the lilacs, just the other side, obliterating an old farm road, and that's where they're moving now. 

There's a good foot or more of new fallen snow on the ground, so you'd think I'd be seeing a parade of critters heading back up the mountain to sleep or down for a drink. One of the most astonishing sights I've ever seen was at dawn in a suburb of Pasadena, California, of all places, on a ledge overlooking a deep, dry, wide gulch where I nursed a migraine and watched what could have been a hundred coyotes retreating from the heat of the day back up into the shade of the hills. Now, staring out my window, nothing. A forest flush with life yet nothing. Birds. Nothing wrong with birds but these flit unpredictably like dots on a screen and flash no color unlike that brazen cardinal that's commandeered a roost in our rhododendron out front.

What I'm seeing are endless shades of gray. Where there isn't grey, there's white like the chests of chickadees (and even many of those are gray), or white snow settled along a limb like a snake waiting to drop. Such a limited palette. So much silence. What's there to hear? So much gray. Where to look? Everywhere is everywhere. 

But, today the sky is dusky blue and the winter light off the pristine snow is blinding as we await what's predicted to be a no nonsense blizzard with marauding winds and sub zero temperatures. Power may go out, but we've got lots of wood and a small portable generator, enough for adequate light and an electric blanket. Standing order: Keep a flashlight right where you can get it, not handy, I mean right where you can get it! Attention must be paid: do not flush while power is out. Don't ask. Now, it's 4:19 pm, and the dusky blue sky has taken on the color of the snow, no longer blinding, mixed with gray. Rather dull but word is Friday will be fifty degrees with two inches of rain shifting to three degrees south of zero with ice palace conditions. The stuff of the Apocalypse.

But, today.

Eight thousand forty six minutes of sky light. At exactly 4:48 pm., the North Pole tilts furthest from the sun. Solstice. The Winter One. December 21, 2022. Mother Earth shifts her gears. She cocks her head and reckons a different direction. It is the shortest day or, as others would have it, the longest night. What was mid-afternoon is now total darkness. In our family, we don't so much as head into the longest night of the year as much as continue through a night of our own. Some sort of respiratory plague has managed to KO any and all celebrations and most celebrants, including our beloved, Joe, who died last week at the unlikely age of five. There is no more space at home taken up by a creature of that name - not next to my desk nor at the bottom of our bed, not when UPS delivers a package, not when his favorite person in all the world - my daughter -  comes home from work.  His water bowl is where he left it. His bone as well. My neighbor brought his backhoe up to our barn where we buried him. 

But, know what? We don't live in Ukraine. Our ills, for the most part, are your standard Winter variety.  Nasty, but they'll pass. The frig is full. As of tomorrow morning, so is the oil tank. The Subaru starts just dandy.  Even though one might be an aging, Russian, Jewish intellectual, one is allowed a bit of the Pollyanna: Life sucks but its bright side really does not.

CELESTE

This short story was sold many years ago to a source that went south before publication. Seems to be a habit with me. 

Celeste would often come to watch while I tended the small patch of ground I had appropriated for a garden at the edge of the woodlot near the married students housing complex. It wasn't much, some tomatoes, lettuce, a mound of zucchini, a couple of eggplants which never got much bigger than plums, but it kept me out of the apartment while my ex-husband rewrote his thesis. She would walk by after class with her briefcase over one shoulder and her laptop over the other, as clean and crisp as a fresh salad, looking as if nothing could ruffle her. Her smile was so warm the vegetables seemed to grow while she stood there. Celeste made you happy to be near her. Eventually, we struck up a conversation; and, shortly after that, I moved into her off-campus apartment. My marriage was over in all but name only, and she was having trouble managing on the teaching fellowship the mathematics department gave her while she worked on her doctorate. I had no place else I wanted to go, and she had to stay put until the end of the year. It was a good arrangement.

She thought of us as the ugly one and the pretty one, though, in fact, I was no prettier than she. Her legs were better, shaped well and quite long, in fact, for a girl her size, and her skin was clear and soft as a butterfly's wing. But, she was born with a hump on her back, and I, thank God, was not. It was a sibling that would have been her twin except the egg split, twisted around and attached itself to her spine. It never developed, although x-rays revealed jaws, a backbone and tiny hips. There was no indication of sex. It formed an elliptically shaped mound covered with skin. It was shiny, I remember, and smooth. I must have already done my mourning for the marriage because being free of it felt like bursting out of the water after being under too long. My ex, I’m certain, felt the same, the only thing we agreed on. For weeks, each morning, I woke up laughing. The loneliness would set in later, but now I saw all the colors of the world again. My appetite came back. I wanted everything from column A and everything from column B. As for men, I brought home all shapes and sizes. My madness amused her, but she wanted none of it for herself.

It wasn't that Celeste didn't like men. She did. She had them as friends. She tutored undergrads. She seemed very much at ease around them, but that was because being with them romantically or sexually was not even an issue. From the time she was a little girl, Celeste knew she could never marry. She knew that the weight of the earth would gradually, inexorably pull her back. She thought of herself as a child's magnet, the one painted red and shaped like a horseshoe, her arms and legs being pulled towards each other. When the spine weakened, they would come together. She decided long ago that if she were to have men in her life at all, she must not make them uncomfortable. Her manner made it clear that she saw them as friends not lovers. She was just Celeste. If she liked you, she wanted to be around you. It was that simple.

Celeste had two passions, one of them mathematics. I found this subject absolutely indecipherable. She thought it elegant. Once, over a bottle of wine, I came close to grasping something she said, but it skipped away from me as quickly as it came. She used the word "symmetry" a lot and was fascinated with what she called the celestial mechanics of Isaac Newton’s gravity, a universe filled with falling bodies where everything, even the tiniest speck of dust, pulls at everything else. A note on her desk read, "Any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity." It was written in block letters with a black magic marker.

One afternoon, I came home early and caught her standing at her desk. She had been crying, the only time I ever saw her do so. The note, written on cardboard taken from a laundered shirt, was propped against a pile of books. The same words had been written on a dozen square, yellow post-its that she had stuck to the telephone, the lampshade and the drawers of her desk.

"What's the matter?", I asked.

"Nothing."

Her other passion was horticulture. Our apartment was filled with plants. Those that needed bright light hung from every window and lined each sill. Those that didn't stood or sat or hung in the very places that were right for them. My favorite was a wandering Jew with tiny red-green leaves that cascaded over its pot like a fashionable hairdo. Celeste was always pinching, re-potting or pruning. She kept busy with her plants the way other women kept busy with knitting. She would mull and talk and dream on her feet this way. I often saw her stop in the middle of fiddling with one of her plants, march to her desk and jot down the solution to some math problem she had been trying to solve. Celeste could grow an avocado tree from a seed and a fern from a carrot top. She could bring a plant back from the dead, but her specialty, that which gave her the most pleasure, was grafting. To take two different stalks and create one beautiful thing was sublime to her. It was Celeste's way of making up for her awkward intrusion into the universe. Perhaps it was a way of celebrating her twin. Whatever, she would set things straight. She would create a natural order of things as she thought they ought to be.

There was one man with whom we both became particularly close. He was an instructor in the history department and one of the handsomest men I have ever met in my life. He was handsome like real people are handsome, not like a movie star. He had curly black hair and hazel eyes. He was fit, but didn't make an issue of it. We met him the day our tub overflowed and damaged our floor as well as his ceiling below. He offered to fix it himself before the landlord knew anything had gone wrong. It would cost us a couple of meals he said, and smiled. Since neither Celeste nor I cooked anything worth eating, we said he'd have to settle for pizza and the Colonel. A deal's a deal, he said. His name was Paul, and he had a carpenter's hands. I knew if I slept with him I would doubtlessly botch it; so, in a rare moment of clarity and self-control, I made a decision not to. Why turn a good friendship into a bad love affair? So, we shared him, Celeste and I, in a manner of speaking. From the moment we met we became fast friends. Paul and Celeste would wait up for me at night, and the three of us would laugh at the gory details of my latest adventure in singles-land. He and I would go to the movies in the afternoon. Not a day went by when some combination of two of us, or three of us, didn't have coffee together. Paul was dating a girl at the time; but Celeste and I knew, even if she didn't, that Paul was accepting a two year fellowship in Germany at the end of the following semester, and that she would not be going with him.

Shortly after New Year's, Celeste began brooding about something. She became quiet and withdrawn. You would say something to her, repeat it even, and she wouldn't hear you. She had always laughed easily and listened well, only now she did neither. When I asked her what was the matter, she shook her head and refused to tell me. Celeste had always made an effort to stand as straight as she could; but, now, the weight of her problem as well as that on her back dragged her down. She hunched under them. It seemed difficult for her to move. One day she walked into my room and said, "I'm going to have a baby."

"You're pregnant?"

"No," she answered, "But, I've been thinking about it, and I've decided I'm going to have one." With that, she smiled and seemed to straighten. She was the old Celeste again. I was frightened for her, for all the obvious reasons, but having been made, the decision brought her back to life again, so I was happy, too. She made me promise not to tell anyone. Anyone. It was to be our own little conspiracy. The two of us were going to find a way to bring Celeste's child into the world. I would be its godmother. That was the easy part.

Since marriage had never been an option for her, courtship had never been a part of her life. Where would she find a man, and how would she get him to do what she wanted? We made lists, went to shopping malls, checked out the faculty. She considered her students. We went to a bar. One afternoon, in a fit of inspiration, I suggested we drive by the police academy. Celeste rejected every man we saw. It was important to her that when it happened, it be done right, since she didn't think she had the heart to do it again. It was equally important that the father of her child never know it.

Spring came and with it the Winter thaw, new buds, creeks and rivers swollen with rushing water, and weather so mercurial it raged one day, burbled the next. Celeste was no closer to her baby than she had been months ago. She was getting depressed. She said she wasn't, but I saw it. Sometime in May, about a month before the school year was to end, Paul invited the two of us upstate to watch him race his kayak in white water. It was still early Spring there, and a horde of people in bright flannel shirts, down vests and knit caps converged on the small town at the mouth of the river with all the exuberance of a rodeo crowd. My God, what a rush! We sat on a boulder and watched the race with the spray leaping from the river in drops that glittered like diamonds. We watched Paul slip rocks and glide through tunnels of water as if he were translucent. Celeste, giggling, told me she felt light as air. It was there she decided that Paul would father her child. As soon as we got back home, she began to prepare for it. Celeste planned that evening as carefully as a new bride her wedding.

It would have to be at night. It would have to be when exams were over. It would have to be when they had a full evening ahead of them because Celeste knew that seducing Paul would take time. I told her she should just out and ask him, but she said no, she couldn't do that, not ask, no. She wanted it to... happen...just happen. Of course, she was also afraid he might say no, and that was not an option she was about to allow. What we finally decided was that we would invite Paul up for a bon voyage dinner, a real one that Celeste and I promised to cook, and then I would make some kind of excuse so as not to be there.

Celeste chose to wear a billowy, diaphanous skirt because her legs were so good. Paul would see them when she walked by the light. She also chose it because it allowed her to move without restriction, and because she would never have to take it off. She was careful that the cut of the skirt helped to hide the curve of her back that began just above her waist. We went shopping together for a top and found one that was a rough weave, black and full, with peasant sleeves and a large hood which fell across her shoulders and down her back. Its front was cut in a conservative "V". Paul’s hands could slip under and lift it easily. Celeste bought a smooth, silk camisole to wear underneath with threads of gold running through it. She debated whether or not to wear panties. She imagined the intrigue of getting them off, how exquisite their removal could be, but she decided against it. Celeste wanted Paul inside her. She wanted nothing that could make him stop and think.

The dinner was a beauty: green leek soup foraged from the woods bordering campus, roast leg of lamb, and tiny, fresh, baby vegetables in a sauce the color of a rose. I had a friend choose the wine. Celeste bought marijuana for the first time in her life. While she cooked, I changed the light bulbs in the living room to softer ones with lower wattage. Celeste thought candles were too obvious and then I left. Paul brought wine as well; and, a few hours later, he and Celeste made love. She found herself on top of him moving with such an unbearable lightness she would have died gladly had she not had another purpose. She knew as he came under her that his sperm had taken.

Paul left for Germany two days later. He hugged us both goodbye. I thought I saw tears in his eyes, but I wasn't sure. I do know that he continued to twist his head around and look our way as his taxi took him to the airport, and that his eyes were on Celeste all the time. Soon after this, I moved to the Coast. Celeste was offered a full time position on the faculty, so she stayed on. Nine months later, she had a little boy. He was right on schedule, perfect in every way. I’d flown from California to be there with her the whole time. He was a pistol, all right, with dark, dancing eyes and a shock of black hair. When I got back to the coast, we talked on the phone while she nursed him, and she put the receiver next to his little mouth so I could hear the sucking noises he made. He screamed bloody murder when she shifted her weight and her breast popped out of his mouth for a second. "He keeps me hopping," she laughed, "My God. My God. Do you believe it?" She never told Paul and made me swear again that I wouldn't, either.

Two years passed. The baby grew. He was a toddler now, big for his age "My muscle," Celeste joked. We hadn't seen each other in all this time, but we spoke often. I had a job that was glamorous and so fast paced it kept me from thinking about my seriously puny problems. Celeste had moved up in rank already, and she had taken to motherhood with a ferocity that rivaled a grizzly's. I laughed and told her she should write her own book on child development, but she was serious when she said she was thinking about it. I might be able to imagine someone loving as much as she did, maybe, but I cannot imagine anyone loving so responsibly. Talking with her made me realize how much I loved her, too. I couldn't bear it when she told me her bones were weakening and her body was beginning to cave in under the weight of her back, not so much that you could really tell the difference right now, she said she had only lost about a half inch of height so far but it would continue to happen until she was bent double to the ground with no room for her heart and lungs to function properly anymore. The only thing she was glad about, she said, was that it would take some time.

Meanwhile, Paul, who kept in touch with the both of us by an occasional postcard, finished up his stint in Germany and returned to the United States. It was the summer of that year and, before taking a teaching position in the midwest, he went back to the university to close out some unfinished business. He was driving by our old apartment when he saw Celeste tending a flowerbed with a toddler crouched beside her patting the grass with the palms of his hands. He stopped and hugged her hello, and they talked for awhile. Paul was, of course, surprised to see that Celeste had a child, but he still had no idea the little boy was his. He felt awkward around her, but he didn't know why. "You could have written and told me. We're friends, right? Why didn't you?", he asked. She shrugged.

"You seemed far away," she said.

"I'm glad for you. It's really what you want, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes," she replied, "It's really what I want."

Then Paul made some excuse about having to go, congratulated her, got in his car and drove off. Celeste called me right away. The worst was over, she said. She dreaded seeing him again. Now, she had. That was that.

Paul called me that evening and told me he had seen her. He was shocked to learn that Celeste had a little boy and upset with both of us for not having told him. "Why didn't you write me?", he asked.

"She didn't want me to."

"What's there to be ashamed of? He's an adorable kid, bright, strong. He's walking, you know. Have you seen him?" Paul went on and on talking about the child, and it seemed to me he could have been describing himself as a little boy.

"I just don't understand why neither one of you bothered to tell me", he complained again.

"It wasn't that," I said.

"What?", he asked.

"That nobody bothered."

"Well, nobody did."

"She asked me not to tell you, I didn't tell you. It wasn't that nobody bothered."

"What's going on here?", Paul asked, a new tone in his voice. He sounded frightened. That was when I told him. I couldn't keep quiet anymore.

He screamed at me. I never heard anybody so angry before. I begged him to calm down before he hurt someone, but he slammed the receiver so hard I thought he had pulverized it. I tried to get Celeste on the phone to warn her he was probably on his way over, but I couldn't reach her. For a week I tried to call, but Celeste didn't answer. Where was she? Finally, three a.m. one morning, the phone rang. It was Celeste. She was crying. "Are you all right?", I asked. "Did he hurt you?"

"No," she answered, "He wanted to, at first, or so he said, but I never really thought he would. He's not that kind of a man."

"Why are you crying?"

"He wants to marry me."

Paul had rushed over to her house in a fury. It was frightening, she said. He tore into her, cursed and yelled until the baby screamed and the neighbors threatened to call the police. Finally, he quieted down. He sat on the sofa and stared at her as she told him everything. When she was finished, he got up and left without saying another word. Days went by. She didn't hear from him. She thought it had passed. Then he showed up unexpectedly and asked her to marry him. "He loves me," she said.

"And you?", I asked.

"I'm frightened."

"Are you going to marry him?"

"He loves me," she repeated, "I can't imagine why, but I believe he does. Yes, I'm going to marry him."

That was a long time ago. Celeste bore two more children, both sons, and I can see her now, surrounded by all her "men". She and Paul bought an old farm with a huge house. They had a garden and an apple orchard, and she filled each room with the plants and flowers she raised herself. It was in this house, with Paul at her side, that she died. The weight of the earth finally pulled her back. The undertaker whispered about the need to break her body in order that she be laid straight in her coffin, but Paul refused. He had her buried near the garden, curled into her grave like a fetus waiting to be born. She faced east so the sun could warm her as it rose.
 
Beautiful women wondered how she ever managed it? I once overheard someone ask her if she didn't feel grateful to have such a wonderful man? Celeste looked at the person as if she couldn't quite comprehend what was being said. Later, she said to me, "Paul loves me, and I love him. I feel blessed. But grateful? I've never felt that."


                                                        End

To Live And Dye In LA

 This piece was written over thirty years ago, sold to three magazines but never published because all three went bankrupt beforehand. Talk about kill fees. So, here it is, as it was, thirty two, no, thirty three years later.

To Live and Dye in LA

I am a man nearly fifty years old, trim, fit, energetic, a man who has spent a good deal of his life engaged in traditional male activities: a hitch in the Marine Corps, hunting, fishing, bushwhacking...As the years passed, I liked the weathered countenance which stared back at me from the mirror, those creases around the eyes which told a tale of a guy who had faced wind and sun and never flinched. In short, I am not a man who ever imagined he would dye his hair. But, I just did.

Why? Maybe it was because a friend of my three year old daughter, noting my hair was nearly white, asked her what would happen to her when her daddy died? Or maybe it was because a twenty-something secretary at Warner Bros. told me how much she liked white hair on "older" men. But probably it was because I work in Hollywood, a place where the aging process is more terrifying than the Bubonic plague. What finally convinced me was when my wife told me her colorist, Michael, was a Texan who grew up hunting quail. You see, the credentials I was looking for in a colorist were different from those you might expect. He had to have shot game birds on the prairies, trekked through Alaska, and be able to name five rivers he had white-watered.

I called for an appointment. My wife was out of town. This was to be between me and Michael, nobody else. His place, The Salon on the Plaza, was in the middle of an upscale stretch of Sunset Boulevard directly opposite a heavily credentialed restaurant named Le Dome. During lunch, on any given day, most of the major players in Hollywood could be found here. How was I supposed to get in the hair salon without anybody seeing me? "Come through the back door," Michael said. I thought I detected some contempt in his voice, but I didn't care. Stealth and secrecy were the operative words here. The appointment was for eleven a.m., time enough to beat the warm duck salad crowd across the street. Worse than Michael’s contempt would be the sneers of my fellow traveler's in the celluloid asylum.

The receptionist guided me to a small changing room. She told me to take off my shirt and put on what looked like a hospital gown, except it was black, crisp, and tied around the front. She then led me through the shop to a chair right smack in the front window.

    "Michael will be with you shortly," she said.

    "I can't sit here," I yelped.

    "Sorry," she shrugged, "All the other chairs are taken".

I panicked and lunged for the newspaper. I had two choices: leave or hide behind the sports section. A little voice in my head said, "Daddy, what'll happen to me when you die?" That left me no choice but to hunker down with the box scores. By the time Michael arrived I had memorized the batting averages of the fifty leading hitters in both leagues, and those parking attendants at Le Dome were limbering up.

We decided to go a conservative route, one that would leave me "graying" but not "grayed". I did not want to look like a middle-aged lounge lizard with his hair dyed black as a mailman's shoe. The formula Michael mixed together looked like icing you'd put on a cake, except it was beige-ish, and it smelled horrible. As he began to work, he took the newspaper from my hand and set it aside. He said it got in his way. I could not run; I could not hide. If I'd given the keynote address stark naked at the Tailhook convention I could not have felt more exposed. 

I watched in the mirror as Michael parted my hair into sections, painted individual strands with a small fan-shaped brush then wrapped them with tinfoil. This was an artist at work. He was meticulous, exacting, precise. And slow. Here I was, a man who once laughed when a sperm whale rammed his little wooden boat, sitting in the window of a beauty parlor with tin foil in my hair, paralyzed with fear that someone would walk by and recognize me.

Finally, my hair was done. I looked front, right, left. Michael held the mirror up behind me so I could see the back. What was so different? This was the way I always looked. Nope. This was the way I always looked ten years ago. Was it really possible that nobody would actually know what I had done? It was time for a test run. I left the shop by the front door and ran into a producer I knew. He asked me where I got the great tan? I hadn't been near the sun for weeks. At home my neighbor told me how good I looked since I took off the weight. What weight? My rabbi's wife thought I was forty-four, and my own wife didn't catch on for three days. But I knew I had really gotten away with it a few days later when a young television executive confided in me how annoyed he was with all the "fossils" in this business. I felt a bit like a traitor -- a geriatric double agent -- but mostly I felt terrific. Little did I know that I was truly in deep and serious trouble. I woke up one morning thinking, "Wouldn't I look great, just a shade darker?" One week later it was even worse. I needed to see Michael. Not that I'd ever do it, but I wanted to ask him: "What would a perm do for me?"

THANKSGIVING, 2002

Wine red cranberries the size of marbles - shooters - mingling with slippery golden slices of mandarin orange.  Royalty. Mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup, the color of a Catskill mountain sunset. North Carolina string bean and mushroom casserole mixed with teensy bits and pieces of crispy, french fried onion rings with the color and texture of a foggy beach flecked by the sea. Martha’s Vineyard at dawn. A legendary corn pudding passed on from one generation to the next, all mouths full. A turkey flayed down to its carcass, ready for its metamorphosis into soup the following morning. Wine and ginger beer and apple cider. Three fresh pies: pumpkin crumble, sweet-tart strawberry rhubarb, juicy apple. Forty-three Thanksgivings. Thirty five with children. Thirty five with children and aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces. And dogs. Hank. Mike. Roady. Bliss. Joe. There were grandparents, too, and are again as well. Even a prayer and a welcome to dinner. This year my daughter has a new house in the family, so our children decided to have our dinner there. Our children decided! Not the contents, of course. The menu is sacrosanct. For now. But where to have it, and where to sit, and when to come? Jamie and I are welcome and honored, but we are not in our home but our daughter’s, with our son and daughter having made the decision to eat there. And when? What time? I didn’t need to stoke the fireplace. I didn’t need to make sure the house was warm, that there were napkins instead of paper towels, that the soap dishes had clean bars of soap, that there was salt on the stoop to melt the snow. Dinner was no less delicious given that the venue was so new. Delicious was a four year old at this table for the first time. Delicious were the faces of dear guests chowing down. One should not be alive but is. Delicious were the faces of my children glowing with satisfaction. Aren’t we always in transition? I know next year there will be turkey and corn pudding, but the rest? Up for grabs. Yep. Up for grabs. 

 

Montana Days - The Bear That Drank My Neighbor's Beer

This was originally published in an anthology of bear attacks – “When Bears Attack”, Skyhorse Press. Prologue courtesy of Joe Healy, editor.

THE BEAR THAT DRANK MY NEIGHBOR’S BEER

By Stephen H. Foreman

Telling outdoor tales is often called yarn spinning. In the following story, the author spins with the best of them, evoking the voice of Faulkner, even. Foreman says: “My fascination with bears grew when I spent five years in western Montana. My alcoholic bear was a true story, but I did have a grizzly encounter in Alaska as well, so here it is. I was hunting and camping up the Yukon about 50 miles below the town of Circle. The night I’m talking about came quickly and very dark—I could not see a damn thing—so I decided to camp where I was and get moving again in the morning. I lay down on a caribou skin, crawled into my sleeping bag, and stared up at the stars. Sometime during the night I heard a snuffling and a puffing so knew there was a bear out there somewhere. When it was dawn and light enough to see, I discovered that I had slept in the midst of a thicket of blueberry bushes, and that the bear had been hosing up berries all around me. The fact that I wasn’t a blueberry no doubt saved me from severe bodily harm.”

Some years ago, my wife and I lived on a small place in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, on a rise at the base of Ward Mountain. We had sixty acres, six chickens, two horses, one beef cow, a garden that yielded radishes the size of peas, one outhouse, and no telephone. A skunk got the chickens, people in Hollywood forgot who we were, and the house we lived in was so tiny we bumped our heads on the bedroom ceiling. But we were newly in love and learning to live together. Other people had hardships. We had adventures.

Our place backed onto two and a half million acres of the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness, and every animal that lived on the continent lived in our backyard. We rode the same trails as the elk herd, knew where the old whitetail buck hid in the swamp, watched grouse drum in the springtime, and coyote pups pogo along behind their mothers. At night, we’d soak in the hot springs and see every star in the Western sky. We even had our own bear.

Judging by the weathered condition of the wood he had clawed on the trunks of trees, he (I always thought of this bear as “he”) had lived on the place a lot longer than the two of us; and, judging by the height of the claw marks (a bear stands up on his hind legs to claw a tree), he was a pretty good size for a black bear. My guess was six feet standing straight up. I had no quarrel with him. In fact, I was happy to have him as a neighbor. He kept to himself, which is what bears do, and for years I never even saw him. Oh, I’d see his sign all the time: large rocks flipped over to get to the ants and grubs underneath, fresh claw marks on the trees, pieces of hair pulled off when he crawled under the barbed-wire fence, scat the poundage of bowling balls. I even heard him once in a while on the ridge north of the house. He sounded like he had a fierce stomach ache, and I imagined he must be getting old to make such a noise, more like a groan than a growl. I always kept a lookout for him, though, especially when I was hunting deer. Sometimes I’d come close. He’d be around or had been around, but he was too sly to be seen. Very few creatures possess the extraordinary sense of hearing and smell that a bear does. The closest I came that I know of was one afternoon when I decided to deliberately look for him. An Athapaskan Indian once told me that if you’re hunting a bear the bear knows it, and that evening at dusk I came to believe that the statement was true. 

I cut through the willow swamp that bordered the property because I knew the bear used it from time to time. It was always wet, and on a couple of occasions I actually saw tracks in the mud. They would be fresh, but not fresh enough. A truly fresh track in a swamp would have the water trickling back into it. That day, right there, right then, water was trickling into a print of his right front paw. He had been there seconds earlier, and I was right behind him. Another track was just a few feet ahead. More mud lay beyond that, but the tracks stopped there. It looked like he veered off over a carpet of broken willow branches. That would leave no sign. Smart bear. He had his radar switched on.

I crossed the willow carpet as carefully as I could to avoid snapping a stick, each twig being a potential firecracker. What helped to smother the noise I made was a fifteen-foot waterfall, which ran off the top of our back pasture. The falls tumbled down wildly over two uprooted trees, and I exited the willow swamp at the base of it. This was a place I visited often. It was a place of peace for me, one where I could sit upwind for great stretches of time and, cloaked by the unruly water, simply watch what came by. Once a whitetail faun passed so close to me I could have touched it, and once I watched a momma mink hop across the trickle followed by three little ones.

With the wind in my face and my footsteps muffled by the grass, I climbed the hill next to the falls. At the top of the hill was a copse of pine and aspen. On the other side of the trees was a small clearing; and, on the other side of that, a trail used by elk to take them through the forest and back up the mountain. I crossed the clearing and stopped by the trail. The day was well into dusk by then, time to turn around and head back. In a minute, I said to myself, in a minute. It was so quiet. I listened carefully. I wished my ears were as powerful as those radio receivers deployed to pick up transmissions from deep space. 

I knew he was there. By this time it was too dark to see anything except the gray and black shapes of the bushes and trees. And, of course, he was black. He could have been any one of these. He was out there, and all his senses were trained on me. It made me uneasy. You don’t want to get too close to a bear, and you don’t want one to get too close to you. I didn’t move. I thought, “I’ll give him time to get away.” It wouldn’t take him more than a few seconds to clear out, and then I could head back to the house. I waited, didn’t move, waited some more. 

“He must be beyond me by now,” I thought. 

Bears just don’t hang around when a human’s in the vicinity. So I took a step back toward the house, back in the direction from which I had just come. That step triggered a roar so loud it sounded as if it had been slammed into both my ears from stereo headphones rigged to full screech. The sound was everywhere, followed by a noise such as the chomping of jaws would make, a sure sign of aggression in a bear. This time I located the sound in front of me. What this meant was that all the while I thought I was tracking him, he had circled around behind and was tracking me. He didn’t need to let me know he was there. I swear I think he did it on purpose. He was warning me to back off. I did what he wanted. I retreated backward a few steps and then circled widely to my right as far as possible away from where he was. We'd remain good neighbors: he'd stick to his; I'd stick to mine. I'd be surprised if that bear didn't hear the beating of my heart.

The next day a neighbor drove over in his ancient pickup and asked me if I’d had any trouble with bears lately. Frank was an old curmudgeon who herded sheep and lived alone in a trailer about a mile away. A bear had taken a sheep a couple of days ago, and last night the bear actually came up to his front steps.

“Want to see somethin’ crazy?” he asked.

He took a beer can from the cab of his truck.

                                          “Lookit this,” he said.

The beer can had a large hole poked in the top.

“It was that goddamn bear,” he continued. “I left a six pack on the front steps when I went out to check the sheep, and that goddamn bear poked holes in the cans and drank up all the beer.”

Of course, I didn’t believe him, but he had five more empty cans with claw punctures on them that he swore was proof. I told him about my encounter with a bear that same night, and Frank was certain it had to be the same one. This bear was dangerous, he said. It had lost its fear of men and somebody’d better shoot it before something serious happened.

The next morning there was a fresh pile of bear scat steaming outside our living-room window as if a bear had stood there watching us. Jamie said she didn’t think there was anything to worry about because we were inside and he wasn’t; but I said to her to imagine that, to a bear on the other side of the glass, we looked to him the way meat wrapped up in cellophane looks to us. I didn’t really believe this and neither did she, not really. It was still spooky, though.

A couple of days later Frank came by again and reported that this time the goddamn bear took his trailer door off its hinges, broke into his refrigerator, and drank another six-pack. Frank was in town playing poker at the time. He wanted me to come over and see the damage for myself. Damn if there wasn’t a broken front door, claw scratches on the refrigerator, and a mess inside. Frank was going to start sleeping with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot. I began to wonder whether, in fact, we did have a problem on our hands.

The next couple of days were uneventful—that is, if any day spent in country as exhilarating as Montana can be called uneventful. What I mean is there’d been no sign of bear, and there were no calls from Frank of any more trouble. That evening I took Jamie to Missoula to catch a flight to New York, but when I got back it was another story. As the headlights from my short bed pick-up swung by the porch, they spooked a bear at the front door. When the lights hit him, he ran and disappeared behind the house. I barely got a glimpse, but there was no doubting what it was. He hadn’t broken into the house, but he was about to. The top screen on the screen door was clawed to shreds. When I went around the back of the house I saw that he had broken into the garbage bin, had literally torn off the lid and scattered garbage everywhere. I spoke to Frank the next day, and he reported that the bear had broken into his storage shed and eaten a bag of oats.  

“He’s a menace,” said Frank, and I had to agree. “We gotta stop him before it’s too late,” Frank added. Yeah, yeah. I agreed again, but this was not something I really wanted to do.

Reluctantly, the next day, I set an ambush. I thawed out a lake salmon I caught earlier in the spring, wrapped it in bacon, put it in a bucket, and poured molasses over it. This was Godiva chocolate to a bear. I chambered my Ruger, 30-.06, single-shot rifle with a two-hundred-and-twenty-grain hand load. It was a deadly accurate piece, and a cartridge like that in the right place would pretty much stop anything around.

I took the bucket out to the swamp and set it down where I’d have a clear lane of fire; then I climbed a hill opposite the target area and sat down with my back against a tree. That way my outline would be broken up, and my scent would be over the bear’s head. I put the rifle on my knees and waited. It was early afternoon, an unusually sunny and hot day for October. I knew I’d probably have a long wait ahead of me, but my idea was to get into position way before anything knew I was there. I was comfortable, too comfortable, and warm, too warm, and I proceeded to fall asleep. My eyes grew heavy, my head dropped to my chest, and I was out of there. When I woke up about an hour later, the bucket was overturned, and the bait was gone. Did this bear have enough sense to wait until I actually fell asleep, or was this just some kind of uncanny coincidence? The truth was I was dealing with a very sly critter. You have to admire a bear like that.

The next day I mixed another concoction of raw salmon, bacon, and molasses, put it in the same spot, and climbed back up to my tree. The day was a little cooler, and I purposely under dressed to keep myself alert. I sat and waited, and waited, and waited, an hour, two hours, going on three, and suddenly there he was. One second the clearing was empty, and the next he was in it. He simply materialized with his nose in the food bucket. He was an awesome animal, bigger than I had imagined, four hundred pounds, maybe even five, and his thick, black hide seemed to wave as if it were underwater. It glistened in the sunlight like an oil slick. The bulk of him was staggering, so much strength, so much mass. I saw no reason to kill such an extraordinary animal except that he had trespassed into the human sphere and so, according to the accumulated wisdom of men in the woods, he had become dangerous and therefore had to die. 

I did not like having been chosen executioner. It was like getting an order to be on a firing squad. Even as I lifted the rifle slowly to my shoulder, I wished I were somewhere else. Even more, I wished the bear were somewhere else, somewhere way back up in the mountains where he could mosey around without a bounty on his massive head. But, at that moment, I didn’t think I had a choice, so I centered the cross hairs just back of his shoulder and eased off the safety. He was sideways to me, an easy shot, two pounds of trigger pressure away from instant mortality. His snout was still in the bucket. What would he know? One minute his mouth would be full of something delicious, and the next would be oblivion. Chances were he’d die happier than I would. Just squeeze the trigger, bucko, and save your neighbors a lot of aggravation. 

But, I didn’t want to, and I could not. He took his snout from the bucket and looked up in my direction. I’m sure he didn’t see me because bears don’t see very well. It was simply a reflex reaction, a quick check of the territory before he finished his meal. He put his snout back in the bucket, snuffled around, and ambled off through the thicket. I snicked the safety back on, retrieved my bucket, and returned to my house. Frank would have had a major heart attack. I made myself some supper, and went to bed early. About three o’clock in the morning somebody pounded on the front door. It was Frank, and he was whirling.

“I got him, goddamnit, I got him,” he hollered. “Y’gotta come up to my place and see this!”

I climbed into my truck and followed him. All the way to Frank’s place I wavered between relief and sorrow. His lights were on and, sure enough, there was the carcass of a bear sprawled across his front steps. Frank had baited him with cans of beer, and he had taken the bait.

“Got him right in the middle of a can of Bud,” Frank crowed.

And he had. Except that this bear was smaller than the one I had seen that afternoon, and this one was cinnamon colored. Also his teeth were worn down, and he was kind of skinny, an older bear and none too healthy, the sort of bear that would trespass for any kind of a meal. He was not the one I had baited into the swamp. I stayed up the rest of the night helping Frank skin out the bear. Skinned out it looked just like a man. Frank offered me a roast as soon as he had the butchering done. I just didn’t want to disappoint him. I said yeah, great, but I really didn’t want one.

Korean War Fantasy

During the Korean War, the Marines were pinned down by Mao's troops at the battle of Chosin Reservoir. Completely surrounded, doomed to die or else, they fought their way out. Chesty Puller, the legendary commander, when told they were surrounded, quipped, "Good. Now we know where they are." The battle has since entered Marine Corps history. I know now that, aside from being a military genius, Chesty Puller was a repugnant  son of a bitch, yet the impact his response had on a ten  year old American boy lingers on.

Korean War trading cards were very big back then. So were comic books. They'd depict battles, heroes, incidents, equipment, airplanes, tanks...One showed the face of a North Korean soldier - evil with blood coming out of his mouth. Really gruesome. Die! Everybody on the playground wanted that one.  Mao was also a favorite. His was a face you wanted to smack. We either traded them or flipped them against a wall in a game of skill to see who could get the closest. A leaner was always the winner. Somewhere in 1951 I came across a Korean War comic book that depicted a chopper that had come under fire and, somehow, a flaming canister  landed inside the rear of the vehicle. It would explode any second if not gotten out of there killing every member of the crew, so one guy grabbed it in both hands - the hero of this story - no matter it was burning and he clutched the canister through the flames - made his way out of the helicopter and ran to where he could safely dispose of the canister. Who among us is tough enough to do such a thing? Am I?

Am I? I always wondered. A lifetime I've wondered. It came up again this morning. The morning ritual around the Donnelly-Foreman household finds me up first and down stairs boiling water and buttering cinammon raisin toast to take back upstairs for Jamie. Tidy. The smile on her face sets the day off right. Great, but what has this to do with the Korean War? And why the hell am I bothering? Bear with me while I figure this one out. 

 We live in the mountains, so the kitchen is often chilly in the morning, ergo, the plates are chilly, too. I place the one for J's toast on top of the toaster while the toast toasts. That gets it warm. This morning it got the plate hot, so hot I almost dropped it carrying it three feet from toaster to table - except that damned Korean War card popped into my mind, and I thought, "I can't drop this. I just cannot drop this." - and I would not drop it even though my fingers really felt the heat and pain but I would not drop it. I would get it to the table. I would not drop it. So, I did. OK. Fine. What's the big deal? You dare to compare a hot plate to a burning metal canister?You're obviously still an eleven year old twerp. Why am I even bothering you all with this story? Why am I even bothering myself with it? I'm not really sure, but, for sure, it's on my mind. 

Eight years later I became a United States Marine. The day I graduated Parris Island with a marksmanship medal and no baby fat remains one of the proudest of my life. In some sense, I still need to be "squared away", an "old salt" still by your side. The Marines have landed. Situation well in hand. Yet, two things eventually sabotaged my military career: 1). A distaste for authority figures, and 2). I really did not want to kill anybody (which was exactly what I spent my time learning to do). Believe numbers 1 & 2, and where y'gonna go from there? What is it with not letting go of a hot plate?

It was not fine china, more like what you'd get at a 50's diner - Ma's Kitchen, down the Pike. Easily replaced. Two pieces of toast. Easily replaced. A couple of slabs of butter? Wipe 'em up. Big deal. Then why? Ironically, I believe the corps instilled in me the irony of knowing you did not have to manhandle to be tough. You do what the situation requires you to do, not without thought, certainly not without fear. To me, having principles means you abide by them. I think a part of me is always in training for some cataclysmic event. Whether that's due to the Corps or "If I don't drop this toast plate then maybe I won't drop the flaming canister, either." I can hear you laughing. Go ahead. Maybe you should. It doesn't alter things.  

Chop Wood, Carry Water - Random Thoughts

Somewhere in the past few years I read a book entitled, Chop Wood, Carry Water. It followed a Buddhist monk as he went about his day, every detail, every step he took, each implement he used, each drink of water he took, each crumb, each breath, attention paid to each facet of his existence while he moved through it. He was not beseeching anybody for anything, simply - simply - flowing through his day appreciating each and every of its aspects. He didn't do chores. He performed devotions. In this way his day became a State of Grace because each moment presented itself as new and vital, each second a wonder after the next. The most basic elements of his daily life, all of them, every one, the nuts and bolts of holding an axe or drawing water, all of this connected him to a Luminous Mystery. This is my understanding of prayer and grace, and, as you can see, there is no theology tampering with how you get there, no blood sacrifice, no Hail, Mary's. Linda Loman, when talking about her husband, Willie, in "Death Of A Salesman" exhorted, 'Attention must be paid'. That Buddhist monk thought the same thing. Pay attention.

So I'm thinking about prayer and wondering what it is other than an attention to details designed to lull you into an appreciation of the sacred, the timelessness of connection with something other, and, since everything is other, you are connected to everything. And isn't that the point? Timelessness, unity, unbearable lightness, peace, thankfulness, gratitude. I might not connect with an Almighty but I do connect to life around me.I cannot imagine St. Theresa felt any better than I do when I water the garden and split firewood - when "I've got my groove on."

Moses had his burning bush. Jack had his beanstalk. I had my hydrangea. 

All summer I paid really close attention to the daily growth of a hydrangea I thought had died over the winter. Its companion, planted five years ago, didn't survive either - tough winters up here - however one morning late in the season a tiny green shoot, smaller than the head of a pin, appeared on the stem closest to the ground. Life! It was fighting for its life. It fascinates and compels me, this struggle for existence. I checked it many times a day, each time I walked by I gave it my focus and damn if I wasn't able to watch it grow. My daughter thought I was delusional, but I hung in there and so did that hydrangea. That pin head became a collar button became a shoot and a leaf then a full grown plant and while it grew too late to flower, it caught the moon in its broad leaves, filled the bellies of assorted beetles, provided protection for a retreating milk snake that lives under our front stoop. 

"Everything that lives is holy." So said William Blake.

I got to thinking.

That humble hydrangea, that plant that would not grow until I nudged it (or so it seemed). I potchkied with it, stroked its leaves, whispered to it, fertilized it, urged it on, watered it gently with a battered watering can, kept the columbine in its place, clipped away debris, kept the soil aerated. When I breathed on it did that help it grow? Hope is not faith. I am not Maimonides, and I am for sure not St. Theresa, but still I ask this question: was I praying? It had my full attention. I was focused on nothing else. I wanted it to live, not just live but flourish. I was so much in the present that what anxieties I had were, at that time, non-existent. And my worries for the future? What worries? What future? I was worried about that silly hydrangea in the right here and now. I was connected to a form of life so different, strange but not really alien unless something seen every day can come to seem alien? It's growth was my growth. I had to heal this thing. Still, it grew too late to flower.

 

Montana Days - KENNY & VERNA

He was an old cowboy in a battered hat leaning against the top rail of my corral. South West Gold Creek Loop, Hamilton, Montana. We'd unsaddled our horses after a morning's ride looking for a neighbor's stray calf, and now they watered and grazed behind us. It was an exquisite day, so bright and dry the valley stretched out golden and fertile for miles. Water wheels sprayed the tended fields, and the Bitterroot River traversed the valley just beyond the tree line. I was pretty much struck dumb by the sight.

    "It's really something, isn't it?", I said to Kenny.

He didn't say anything right away, but then he did.

    "Feels just like bein' in a corral to me."

Kenny Trowbridge broke horses for the army in WW1. He was just a kid of fifteen. There were no corrals, no fences, nobody telling you which way to go when your way was another. He lived down the road in Darby with Verna, each their second marriage. She had quite the story as well. She was the first bride to come to Jenny Lake at the very start of its settlement, the very first one, back in the 19th century. Jenny Lake, Wyoming, right near the Grand Tetons, the Big Tits. She was a mail order bride travelling west to make her life here. It was deep winter when she first arrived, and remembered crossing a frozen Jenny Lake (actually, it hadn't been named, yet) in a horse drawn sled terrified they'd fall through the ice and freeze to death. By the time she was widowed there, Verna could walk miles blindfolded and still find her way, and yet. One year she and Kenny decided to drive down to Jenny Lake just to see the place. I don't think she'd been there in sixty years or so. Here's the thing: she could not find her way around. Given the highways and construction, she simply didn't know where she was any more - a place once she knew so well. "It's like when you get older," she told me, "You don't recognize your face anymore." 

Verna would call me first thing in the morning right after hunting season and invite me down for biscuits, gravy, and elk's liver. Get my day started right. God, I loved that stuff! With coffee that would support a bayonet.Then Kenny would take me into his work shed and teach me how to hand load my own bullets.There's an art to this because you're able to regulate the speed, trajectory, and punch of a bullet designed just for you and specifically for the game you are hunting. Jamie and I still hang a quilt Verna made us for a wedding present. The two of them had been married the better part of fifty years. They wouldn't still be alive - they were in their eighties when we knew them - and I imagine they passed on not that much longer after we left Montana.

Eugene Bardach

 

We're talkin' seventy years. Wow! When I was a kid I was friendly with a genius named Eugene Bardach who told me he never did any homework, and I believed him. I, of course, failed repeatedly, and Gene, of course, got into Princeton at 16, locked in his ph.d at 22. Theoretical physics. Something like that. Quarks and black holes. A real supernova, this kid, Eugene. Gene was another kid my mother wished were hers.

Why am I memorializing Eugene Bardach, a guy in my thoughts for some reason although I doubt I am in his? Why would I be? And why is he?

Now, in our corner of the woods, we are quickly approaching the peak of this Fall season. The experts say we are 70% there. I don’t know from numbers, but it's dazzling. I envision hundreds of thousands of kneeling colonial militiamen armed with muskets, firing great puffs of multi-colored smoke out from the hills. I am taken by St. Anne’s Peak across the way. Yesterday it was Summer, and yesterday it was green. Now, it’s Autumn, just a day later, it’s Autumn, and the hills are more alive to me now than when they were truly prime and vibrant, when they proudly puffed out their great, green, gunny sergeant chests. Now, we have red and bronze and yellow and orange - puff, puff, puff - volley upon volley - they detonate and push their colors . Green shimmers. Colors dance.

The hills. The hills and Eugene Bardach. Eugene and I would ride our bikes to this store that sold chemicals where we’d buy a bunch of powders like cyanide (blue), sulphur (yellow), magnesium (white), ferrous oxide (red). We’d go back to my house, make a small packet out of newspaper for each chemical, wrap the mix in a large sheet of newspaper, and set it on fire in the driveway. Vshoom! Shoom! With a great hissing sound, a circus of colors shot up in all directions as the burning newspaper triggered chemical explosions - one after another, two at once, vshoom, vshoom vshoom, two more, each packet flaming its true, pure color. The rush we felt when that little fury was unleashed was exhilarating. It was pure mischief, pure anarchism but no more so than St. Anne’s Peak right now. So, the "wondrous strange" sight of St. Anne's leaves triggers the memories of a multi-colored chem bomb built by crew cut, pre-teens in the 50's. Strange the thoughts we have and when we have them, yeah?

 

Aging (More Thoughts On)

 I’ve said it before: the displeasure of aging is that I cannot do much of what I used to. The pleasure of aging is that I’m still trying with zero plans to wave the white flag anytime soon. I realize I’m fortunate to have escaped most of the ravages suffered by others, until this year, that is. One subdural hematoma leading to one set of seizures leading to one triple bypass, and currently one broken foot have brought me into the fold. Back surgery is a few weeks away. Still, I’m brisk. I feel great. People guess my age at twenty years younger. I hear and see just fine. My brain is usually not muddled - in other words, I’m aging well. But, tell me this: just what is aging well? Am I aging well because I’m not bent over and still have my teeth and still have my hair? Or am I aging well because I can still quote T.S.Eliot? (“I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”) Or am I aging well because my  heart is still filled with wonder at the sounds and sights and smells around me or because I have a grandson who is four…AND…because I have a grandson who is four. Take your pick. 

Writing helps me sort it all out. 

When folks ask me, what’s my secret, I tell them, “Immaturity”. And I am serious. Immaturity is my saving grace. My emotions are generally unabated. Fortunately, I am amused more often than I am angry, more bemused than wrathful. I still retain that sense of wonder that seems to see everything for the first time. They say that inside every elderly person is a young person wondering what the hell ever happened? Yes, there’s that wonder, too, but it’s not the wonder that predominates.The wonder that predominates these days is the high sun on orange leaves, a a tiny black bear cub, no bigger than a cocker spaniel,scampering up the hill, an eight pointer ready for the rut,the Fall crop of acorn squash and carola potatoes from RSK Farms…so many things as the air goes crispy…so many things but none so wonderful as four years of new life raring to go.I show him things and he sees them and then I see them again. I tell him things, and the telling is always new. He is so much but he isn’t all.

Here’s what else is exciting about life these days. I am not reliving the past so much as wondering over it, as in sense of wonder, sense of wow, sense of I did that? Really? No shit? I trekked across Alaska? I gave a sperm whale a noogie? I lived in Italy? I married an actress? I’m still married to an actress? The same one even! I am re-discovering the excitement of my life, that so much of it was what I dreamed it would be when I read those adventure chronicles as a child splayed out on the carpet surrounded by books - The Occident and The Orient was a favorite. Stephen of Arabia. Stephen of Khartoum. Stephen of Babylon. Stephen of Borneo. Head hunters. Smugglers. Cattle wranglers. Prophets. Pirates. Whalers. Mercenaries. They were all out there, stories waiting to be told, aching to be told if only I could get to them. I was single digits sitting on the floor in brown corduroy short pants looking at pictures of whirling dervishes and camels and shrunken heads and scimitars, charging horsemen and near naked hunters painted blue with bones in their beards, wild animals and rugged terrain, and I wanted to be there. Where? Down that river. Over that rise. Anywhere exotic, anywhere, and I often didn’t realize the danger ‘til I was in the midst of it. It’s not that I’ve been drawn to danger per se, but to places and activities that entailed a certain amount of risk. However, the risk was not the point; the action was, the place was, the people were.The stories I tell are the stories they told me, both implicitly, around the fire, and explicitly, those stories you get by just tuning in. Be warned. Expect that anything you say around a writer might be fodder.

So, what happens when you get to the age where every step you take hazards a break that takes more time to heal than you might have? The risks can no longer be physical ones. Accept it. That leaves The Brain. How to break new ground at this stage? For example, I wonder what it would be like to stay nice all day, regardless of who or what would normally piss me off, to pass no judgment, to offer no criticism? Can I keep my mouth shut when I normally would not? Can I resist MSNBC for twenty-four hours? Can I possibly skip that really important podcast? Would my blood pressure erupt or simply pleasantly burble? Wait. Maybe there’s another way to look at it. Why feel the pressure to take any more risks at all? There’s the hook. Let yourself off it. Dues have been paid. Next. Perhaps peace and quiet aren't so boring after all.

THOSE CHAMPIONSHIP ROUNDS - 12/23/2022

I am drawn to controlled violence, men who have trained themselves way deep into muscle memory where instinctive movements are designed to both dispatch and protect when triggered.I find Mixed Martial Arts brutal, artless, ugly,  awful to watch. You may feel the same way about boxing, but where you see a brutal artlessness, I see grace and tactics, footwork, astonishing resilience, interior strength, superb  conditioning, incredible courage.To do in the ring what it is harder, often forbidden, to do outside of it - to fight back, to pull it up from the floor and go for it because the alternative is to give in and that is no longer an alternative. It's the heart, not the organ but the soul of the person, his spiritual guts. In the ring to compromise is to lose.

Boxing is a passion of mine, about the only sport I follow, probably because it was something I shared with my father. Back in the fifties, from St. Nicholas arena, Gillette blue blades brought you the Friday night fights in living black and white TV, whooping at Carmen Basilio, an otherwise dogged fighter, who "blocked with his face." Other names from that time - all legends - Kid Gavilan, Sugar Ray Robinson, La Motta, Two Ton Tony Gillento, Emile Griffith (who beat an opponent to death in the ring because the guy, a Frenchman, called him a faggot)-so many guys out there half naked fighting their hearts out."You can run but you cannot hide", said the great Joe Louis. That's the part: you cannot hide. Everything you've got and haven't got is out there for the world to see. There is no one to help you. You either fight your heart out or you quit, and you do not quit. There is no time out. My favorite movie line comes from DiNiro as LaMotta after he's been beaten to a pulp by Sugar Ray Robinson. He's bleeding and barely able to stand, still up but hanging on the ropes. Barely able to speak but still defiant, "I'm still standin', Ray. Ray, I'm still standin'."

So.

Those Championship Rounds.

The final two of any prize fight: rounds eleven and twelve at the elite level. Dig in to the end. Fight with everything you've got. Leave it in the ring. Of course, there's that knockout punch, the one you don't see coming, but isn't there always?

I watched a prize fight recently - heavyweight championship - Usyk vs Joshua. Good fight. Why? Because it came down to the championship rounds, the final two, the two that need you to dig down deeper than you've ever dug before, the two where fights are won or lost. The bell has wrung. Round eleven. 

Stephen Howard Foreman has been blessed. He's made it to the championship rounds. He's taken a licking but kept on ticking. Broke his nose. Got knocked out. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - bring 'em on! Brought 'em on. To paraphrase the lady when she sang out loud, "He's still here." Yogi Berra chimes in, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." Foreman has two rounds left. So, now, what does he do? His physical powers have faded, but it's never really been about the physical, has it? 

These are my championship rounds. What do I need to do? 

The most overwhelming thing in my life these days is my feeling for my grandson, four years old, and, of course, never has there been another so bright and so beautiful.It isn't that this feeling is more intense than any I've had for my wife and children. Certainly, Jamie pole axed me the instant she walked through the door. My children have had me mesmerized since before birth. But love for Dorian is unencumbered in a way those never were. You meet the woman you will marry, and you hope she loves you back. Your children are born into this world, and their cries tell you how much they need you. But, an innocence attends my grandson. I only need to love him. 

I see this awakening at this point of my life - this encounter with innocence - as a blessing. To feel so much that is so pure and good is an extraordinary thing, as much a miracle as any I know this side of the supernatural. That sense of wonder! At four score and nearly two years, I am reluctant to feel otherwise. So I focus on the moment, focus on the feeling when it's there, transfuse it, pack it away but not too far, able to retrieve it at a nanosecond's notice. Is this love, what it really is? If I could take this feeling and wrap it around all the things of my day - and keep it there - oh,the peace and exultation that would bring. To feel what I feel when I watch him sleep would mean that I had won. 

        

Me 'n' Marlon

One night way some time back when my career had taken a serious dive, I came quick aroused in the middle of the night, straight from the depths of a dream,  and had to wake up Jamie right then and there to share the incredible news.  An epiphany: I'd missed my calling. I should have been an actor. I'd just had a dream wherein I was more brilliant than Brando in "On The Waterfront". "I coulda been a contender..." brought tears to my eyes. Jamie had to see this. "Wake up, J! You gotta see this!" So, Jamie shakes herself awake and glares at me like "this better be good".

    "Listen to me, J. Just listen to me."

I had her undivided attention and launched into that famous speech certain I was once again about to out Brando Brando. The look on J's face was pure horror as she realized her husband, always threateningly close to the edge, had now truly passed over it. 

    "I coulda been a contender..."

    "Stop it."

    "It was you, Charlie, it was..."

    "Stop it!"

    "The extra cash wouldn't hurt."

    "You're not serious."

    "You could coach me."

    "Good night, Gracie."

That was a good couple of decades ago. I haven't acted since, and my career, while not exactly booming, is no longer on life support. 

PS:

Just for the record. Way back in 1973, Shirley Rich, a well known casting director, was casting my first national drama for PBS - The Resolution of Mossie Wax. She offered to send me out on acting calls. Pass. I told her, "Uh, uh. I'm having too much trouble learning how to be me let alone trying to figure out how to be somebody else."